it's taken many years but i've come a long way. i never gave up on coding because it was too dear to me as a form of expression, but for a while it inevitably involved a meltdown. i never wanted to let those bastards take the craft from me, and though i still melt down sometimes, they never did take it. i feel more committed than ever to the stewardship of the craft and i feel more fulfilled than ever by what i accomplish.

it feels pretty weird that so many other devs i know have tech-related ptsd, like that it's just standard to the profession. of course you'll develop stress tremors and debilitating triggers; of course you'll be used and abused; but we're building The Future!! by killing people. besides, the pay is good, right? why complain? 🤦‍♀️

the consequences of our craft require a higher standard, both for our practices and our treatment.

@6gain both: bosses abuse us as workers and launder blood through our efforts without our knowledge or consent. it disturbs me how i and so many close to me found themselves writing software with body counts when we thought we were building idle civilian tools.

@garbados I love this idea of what we do as a craft though, as you say. The art of everything from lines of code, up through to pattern design, through to system design, and team relationships. Strikes such a chord, and something I've been trying to figure out the last year. Shit, there's got to be better ways to defend and promote this.

@6gain FL/OSS is an important tactic to it but i feel like collective action is the other half: unions and cooperatives, for example. and the momentum for those is growing all the time: every time they squeeze us, we come closer together, and together we are strong!

@6gain corpers imagine we are replaceable but they betray their ignorance with that sentiment. the aquihire and inevitably low bus factors speak to the rarity of our expertise; we find our craft experiencing both labor starvation and a resource glut, leading to oceans of malware masquerading as utopian works. we are in a unique position to organize against this, to obviate prevailing powers by leveraging our structural advantages.

Thinking about it, this also comes back to something I wanted to do about tech team values, and the idea of making shared tech ideals more open, with more weight. Currently that's not even part of the discussion in most places.

@garbados Feels a bit like where the agile manifesto sprang out from, that feeling of disempowerment, and the idea that the wider system could be done better - that "tech" doesn't stop at the codebase or the command line, but extends out to the people, the team, the relationships and the deliverables.